Our Story

AEL’s Origin

The Aerospace Education Lab (AEL) program was developed by NASA, in partnership with the Cuyahoga Community College, to support the Science, Engineering, Math and Aerospace Academy (SEMAA), a 4-12 program to excite students from underserved and underrepresented groups about math and science.

The AEL located at ISMuL (UPR-Arecibo), is the 16th in the US Nation, and the first outside the continental USA. This site was inaugurated on September 22, 2000 and re-inaugurated on November 17, 2010 and has since received thousands of students as visitors.

Student’s Experiences

If you or your students ever visited AEL, there might be a chance that your visit is documented in our visits archive. Pictures go from July 2000 to the Present Day. Not all visits have been documented but you are welcome to look for your AEL Experience.

Future AEL

At present, we are developing a new curriculum for the AEL lab. The aim is to teach some basic physics, biology, geology and psychology concepts applied to human and robotic interplanetary exploration. We have developed a lunar/planetary/asteroid lander simulation, a robotic geology explorer simulation, and are halfway developing an interplanetary spaceship trajectory simulation. These simulations are in keeping with the spirit of the AEL aeronautics curriculum for future students to explore.